Before I forget to mention this, please take a waltz over to Pippa’s blog at Welsh Quilts to see the bright yellow, whole-cloth and hand quilted masterpiece that she recently posted! OMG, it is stunning! Can you imagine the time it took to mark that quilt for stitching? Amazing!
Yesterday I put the binding on Samantha’s “Pinwheel Polka Pots” quilt. Yesterday I posted a link to a binding tutorial and said I always hand stitch the binding to the back. Well, I got to thinking about it, and thought this might be the perfect quilt to have a machine-sewn binding, so I gave it a try. Major FAIL! I sewed the binding to the front of the quilt as usual. Then I turned it around to the back, overlapped a smidge so that I could stitch in the ditch from the front to “grab” it, and things were whizzing along just fine. And then… FAILURE. I had gaps where the machine didn’t catch the binding on the back.
Back to the drawing board.
You should know I have been known to ignore rules. Here’s what I did to correct my problem. I inserted the pins differently than what was shown in the tutorial. Instead of putting the pins parallel running in the same direction as the binding, I put mine perpendicular to the binding. I had been pulling out the pins as I came to them when they were parallel, and that allowed the binding to shift as I sewed.

This way with the pins perpendicular, I could keep the pins in place, and yes, I sewed right over them.
I warned you that I break rules!

My old Bernina was quite content to sew over the pins this way, and the binding turned out fine.

Did you notice that I didn’t say “the binding turned out great?” That’s because I really prefer the look of a hand-stitched binding on the back. I don’t like the machine stitching showing. So I will limit my use of this method to quilts that will be lovingly used, for machine quilted pieces that will receive a lot of washing, etc. I won’t use this on my hand quilted quilts.
So Polka Pots is now finished, except for the label, a toss in the washer and then in the dryer. Stay tuned!